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Recordings

Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series is fast becoming a worthy successor to the seminal Schubert and Schumann Lieder sets on the label. This fourth volume features a veteran of these recordings, the great British baritone Christopher Maltman. Roger Vigno ...» More

Humbly I submit to the yoke,
Bow, smiling, this head before misfortune,
And this heart too that loves and has faith,
Before my enemy. I do not rise
Resentfully against this torment,
I’m more afraid it will one day abate.
When the radiance of your eyes
Has translated this pain into vital sap,
What pain will have the power to kill me?

English: Richard Stokes

It may seem an odd decision on Strauss’s part to begin the Opus 15 group, otherwise devoted to poems by von Schack, with his one setting of a poem by Michelangelo. And yet Madrigal, with its rather formal, sculptural quality, makes an effective preface to the more highly charged Romanticism of the succeeding songs, and Strauss presumably did not want to lose the opportunity to see it in print.

Beginning in diatonic, almost classical mode, Strauss warms to Michelangelo’s theme in the middle section, with a series of modulations articulating the paradoxical pride with which the poet bows to his fate. The original text, ‘Porgo umilmente all’aspro giogo il collo’, was translated by Sophie Hasenclever.

With your rain and stormy showers,
Welcome, December moon,
And light my way to the dear house,
Where my beloved mistress dwells!

Never was maytime’s blossom,
The sky turning blue, the sparkling dew
So heartily welcome, as today your snows,
Your mists and clouds of grey.

For through the drifting flakes,
More lovely than any laughing spring,
The spring of love gleams and blooms
Secretly for me in the winter night.

English: Richard Stokes

Von Schack’s fondness for nature imagery was very appealing to the young Strauss. Here the winter storm is graphically presented by the piano’s rasping G minor arpeggios and exultant semiquaver flourishes, ranging across the whole keyboard and echoed by the singer’s own fanfare-like triplets as at ‘Sei mir willkommen, Dezembermond’. In the second section flats give way to sharps, minor to major and the driving rhythms give way to free floating triplets, as the singer rejoices in the spring that love has awoken in his heart. A special touch is the momentary hush on ‘Mir heimlich nun’ before the return to the winter night and the exuberant playout.

O do not revile life’s sorrows!
Do you not see dying leaves,
In autumn’s golden light,
Turn a richer hue than in spring?
What can compare with blooms that die
In the sighing October breezes?

More crystalline than the clearest stream
Is the glint of tear-welling eyes.
Evening glows deeper and darker
Than the noonday sun overhead,
And no one kisses so ardently
As those who must part for ever.

English: Richard Stokes

A ghostly harp-like arpeggio is the only preamble to this song, whose message is that beauty arises from suffering, in this case couched in warm flat-key harmonies supported by rich left-hand doublings. Composed as a stream of consciousness, it introduces a completely new melody at ‘Krystallner als die klarste Flut’ and its rhetorical climax is characterized by wide vocal intervals that match the rather inflated mood of the poem.

Like the heart, when it has long
Striven in vain for a tear
That might end its torment—
So the earth, which, numb with hoar and frost,
Had been held captive by winter’s icy crust,
Now breaks forth.

Through woods and fields, mountains and lakes,
Its old ache now wells up running wild,
And turns green on branches and tendrils
And turns dark in the blue of heaven,
And quivers in drops of dew
That waver on the grasses.

Now, O grief for her that I lost,
Break out too from your numbness
And join the river’s flood.
You shall glow in the cloud’s lightning
And blossom with the dame’s violets
And bleed with the roses.

English: Richard Stokes

This is the first of two songs taken from von Schack’s Lieder der Trauer (Songs of sadness)—hence the title, which it shares with its opposite number in the companion group. Where the Opus 17 song is spare and mysterious, this one is a full romantic flight of passion and invective (‘Nun, Gram um sie’—‘Now, O grief for her’). The galloping triplets look ahead to Wie sollten wir geheim sie halten (Op 19 No 4), the left-hand horncalls to Mein Herz ist stumm (Op 19 No 6). Both songs are also settings of von Schack, the common metaphor being the thawing of a frozen heart symbolized by the unfreezing of nature.

The boughs are swaying more gently,
The small boat races ashore,
The dove’s coming home to its nest,
My heart’s coming home to you.

Often enough by shimmering day,
Amidst the clamour of life,
It has winged its roving way
Far into the distance.

But now the sun’s departed
And silence descends on the grove,
It feels: peace is where you are,
Repose is with you alone.

English: Richard Stokes

The best song of Opus 15, and the only one to have achieved popularity, Heimkehr makes a highly effective end to the group, as does Opus 17’s similarly watery Barkarole. The slow beat of oars can be heard in the piano’s soft chords, with their rapt play of harmonies, while the right hand’s motif of parallel thirds evokes the quiet sway of branches and the dove’s homeward flight. The sense of homecoming is underlined not only by the third verse’s return to the opening music, but also by the Neapolitan relationship that links the simple plagal cadence of ‘bei dir ist der Frieden’ to the final, blissful resolution in the home key of E major. Both this song and Winternacht were dedicated to Strauss’s aunt, Johanna Pschorr, who had been of particular encouragement to the young composer, and was initially intended to be the dedicatee of his highly successful first group of songs, Op 10 (that honour went instead to the tenor Heinrich Vogel).